Encouraged by the rise of the socio

Encouraged by the rise of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) during the 1980s, scholars began elevating the importance of private and public spaces, and their interrelation, within the history of science. Adherents to SSK emphasized the situated- ness of knowledge and its transformation from private experiences into public matters, or as Steven Shapin (1995, 305) explained, SSK illuminated “the textual and infor- mal means by which scientists labor to persuade others, to extend experience from private to public domains.” In this vein, Shapin and Simon Schaffer argued in their highly influential Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985) that the private pneumatic tri- als made by Irish chemist Robert Boyle and his assistants in England during the late sixteenth century became credible knowledge through techniques—material, literary, and social—of persuading public audiences. Building upon SSK’s emphases, historical geographers advanced a literature concerned with private and public “geographies of science,” offering rich, empirical analyses of the practices and performances of science as “spatially distributed” (Smith and Agar 1998; Livingstone 2003; Livingstone and Withers 2011).